DAGGTAX: A Taxonomy of Data Aggregation Processes

Data aggregation processes are essential constituents in many data management applications. Due to their complexity, designing data aggregation processes often demands considerable efforts. A study on the features of data aggregation processes will provide a comprehensive view for the designers and ease the design process. Existing works either propose application-specific aggregation solutions, or focus on particular aspects of aggregation processes such as aggregate functions, hence they do not offer a high-level, generic description. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of data aggregation processes called DAGGTAX, which builds on the results of an extensive survey within various application domains. Our work focuses on the features of aggregation processes and their implications, especially on the temporal data consistency and the process timeliness. We present our taxonomy as a feature diagram, which is a visual notation with formal semantics. The taxonomy can then serve as the foundation of a design tool that enables designers to build an aggregation process by selecting and composing desired features. Based on the implications of the features, we formulate three design rules that eliminate infeasible feature combinations. We also provide a set of design heuristics that could help designers to decide the appropriate mechanisms for achieving the selected features.